Amazon.com Inc. is offering to help the Biden administration accelerate the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the incoming chief executive officer of Amazon\u2019s retail unit, offered his congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He reiterated a request Amazon made to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month asking that frontline workers among the company\u2019s more than 800,000 U.S. employees receive vaccines at the \u201cearliest appropriate time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even as much of Amazon\u2019s white-collar corporate workforce at its Seattle headquarters and other offices toil from home, the company\u2019s warehouses, cloud-computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores have stayed open through the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clark said Amazon has a contract with an occupational health provider to administer vaccines at its facilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reuters reported on the letter earlier Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAdditionally, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration\u2019s vaccination efforts,\u201d Clark went on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOur scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately\u201d in the fight against the disease, he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this month, Jay Carney, a former Biden staffer who now runs Amazon\u2019s policy and communications teams, said the company had offered aid to officials working on the presidential transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve offered suggestions, our experiences, and we\u2019re open to any ideas the administration might have, the incoming administration might have, in how we can help,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress over its growing power, and it isn\u2019t clear whether the Biden administration will step up that scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the virus began spreading across the U.S., America\u2019s second-largest private-sector employer has made major adjustments to its sprawling logistics network to accommodate social distancing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, Amazon last year said that some 20,000 of its employees had tested positive for the virus in the first six months of the pandemic. Some employees, lawmakers and labor officials have criticized Amazon\u2019s response to the crisis as insufficient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amazon.com Inc. is offering to help the Biden administration accelerate the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees. In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the incoming chief executive officer of Amazon\u2019s retail unit, offered his congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. He reiterated a request Amazon made to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-various"],"yoast_head":"\n